'Tis but a cot roofed in with straw, A hovel made of clay; One door shuts out the snow and storm, One window greets the day; And yet I stand within this room, And hold all thrones in scorn; For here beneath this lowly thatch, Love's sweetest bard was born. Within this hallowed hut I feel Like one who clasps a shrine, When the glad lips at last have touched The something deemed divine. And here the world through all the years, As long as day returns, The tribute of its love and tears, Will pay to Robert Burns. ABRAHAM LINCOLN I. ON the 12th of February, 1809, two babes were born--one in the woods of Kentucky, amid the hardships and poverty of pioneers; one in England, surrounded by wealth and culture. One was educated in the University of Nature, the other at Cambridge. One associated his name with the enfranchisement of labor, with the emancipation of millions, with the salvation of the Republic. He is known to us as Abraham Lincoln. The other broke the chains of superstition and filled the world with intellectual light, and he is known as Charles Darwin. Nothing is grander than to break chains from the bodies of men--nothing nobler than to destroy the phantoms of the soul. Because of these two men the nineteenth century is illustrious. A few men and women make a nation glorious--Shakespeare made England immortal, Voltaire civilized and humanized France; Goethe, Schiller and Humboldt lifted Germany into the light. Angelo, Raphael, Galileo and Bruno crowned with fadeless laurel the Italian brow, and now the most precious treasure of the Great Republic is the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Every generation has its heroes, its iconoclasts, its pioneers, its ideals. The people always have been and still are divided, at least into classes--the many, who with their backs to the sunrise worship the past, and the few, who keep their faces toward the dawn--the many, who are satisfied with the world as it is; the few, who labor and suffer for the future, for those to be, and who seek to rescue the oppressed, to destroy the cruel distinctions of caste, and to civilize mankind. Yet it sometimes happens that the liberator of one age becomes the oppressor of the next. His reputation becomes so great--he is so revered and worshiped--that his followers, in his name, attack the hero who endeavors to take another step in advance. The heroes of the Revolution, forgetting the justice for which they fought, put chains upon the limbs of others, and in their names the lovers of liberty were denounced as ingrates and traitors.